“When smart TVs came out I was really quite enthused by it all,” Anthony Rose, the co-founder of hot social TV app Zeebox — and a former head of the BBC’s iPlayer project — told me over the weekend. “But that enthusiasm really has declined for me, because they have failed to embrace what technology can offer.”

He thinks that making TVs ape computers by adding apps and proprietary controls and interfaces has caused a war between manufacturers and broadcasters that has “halted innovation.”

“You can buy your beautiful, new connected TV, and you can either be in the one area that watches live TV, or, 18 clicks later, you can be in the app store and do something else — and no one ever goes to the app store,” he said. “On my iPad it takes about 60 seconds for zero cost to be trying some new application.

“I think innovation will flourish here and that in the future your TV will be a beautiful but dumb hi-res panel that will play the content it is told to by your smartphone or tablet.”

Follow the money

Focused on the question of where the emerging investment trends were in this area, the answers from the panelists — Rose was joined by Ralph Eric Kunz of Catagonia Capital, an investor in German video discovery app Tweek.tv — came loud and clear.

While many are still focused on the disruption of distribution, such as IPTV or video on demand, that area is mostly covered now, they said: The future lies in developing new and interesting ways to use the plumbing.

“It feels very much like the music space 10 years ago,” said Kunz, who was one of the architects of German media group Bertelsmann’s purchase of Napster a decade ago.

“I think this whole plumbing era is the necessary prerequisite for the innovation era. The interesting thing is how established industry . . . is actually going to hedge their bets. There’s a lot of value in the old world that’s going to be destroyed.

“Without knowing what the future will look like, I think this ‘second screen’ will be a complementary way of looking at content — in some circumstances it might even be the ‘first screen.’ I think that’s one of the fascinating innovation areas of the future, to figure out how those screens interact with each other.”

His belief is that this will come in large part through social innovations and applications that provide a companion experience to big-screen viewing — hence the investment in Tweek, which recently launched an iPad app for finding video content that you might want to watch.

“I think in the end, the question will be, Is the selection process, are the criteria for selection, the ways I select, going to change? I think Facebook plays a strong role in that today, but we don’t know what that’s going to look like in the future. Tweek TV goes in that direction, to build an interface that is focused on moving content in order to make a much better selection process in future.”

Broadcasters could be cut out of the loop

Meanwhile, Rose said he believed the big disruption in TV was happening at the human level, because technology means that program producers are now able to access audiences in ways that weren’t possible before.

“Back in the old days before the Internet, the audience would engage with the broadcaster — the broadcaster created a channel and an aggregation and schedule things, and the audience were there and the broadcaster would buy content, and the content provider or owner really had no direct audience engagement. Then came the Internet and the makers of Glee could set up a website — but they were disconnected. Now with the rise of second-screen viewing, with companion viewing, there’s a way for the content producer to connect directly to the audience.”

Large producers can now create applications and experiences that audiences can use that deepen their link to the program, he said. And that could leave broadcasters becoming little more than a pipeline.

“The broadcaster, who today is a distributor, a channel and a content provider, may ultimately be like an ISP, and the audience engages directly with the program maker. That’s one way it may play out.”